In traditional employment seeking situations, a candidate or a firm offering the services of various candidates (herein a “vendor”) submits a résumé to a company for consideration as an employee or an independent contractor. Such a submission is normally in response to a position opening at an employer that the candidate or vendor has learned about via advertisements or through other marketing efforts. The employer then evaluates all the résumés submitted, compares their skills and experience, and selects some of them for interviews or further evaluation. If the employer is interested, it may schedule an interview with the candidate or ask the vendor to arrange one, pursuant to hiring the candidate. Although hiring decisions have been traditionally made in this fashion, the process is far from ideal.
On the candidate side, an effort must be made to identify possible employers and send them a résumé at the time a suitable position is open. Given the vast number of potential employers that may exist for a certain profession, this effort requires assessing which employers are currently hiring and, more specifically, which employers are most likely to hire. Often, this amounts to a hit or miss approach involving subjective decision making and even outright guessing. The candidate consequently may spend time and money repeatedly soliciting an employer who is not interested, or worse, may miss an opportunity with an interested employer.
On the employer side, a vast number of résumés may be received without necessarily being solicited. These résumés require administrative and managerial time and effort to sort through and evaluate them. This can become a time consuming and tedious task. Although software has been developed to scan through these documents, the search techniques used typically involve a simple textual word search. These techniques can be intolerant of terminology, spelling, format, and case differences between the employer's search terms and the résumé terms. Moreover, these search techniques usually are not capable of performing relationship logic or quantitative evaluation of the applicants' skills and experience. Consequently, qualified candidates may be overlooked, and unqualified candidates selected.
The problems faced by candidates and employers are also faced by vendors which match particular candidates to openings of employers. From a vendor's perspective, skilled manpower must be dedicated to matching various employers' job requirements with the backgrounds of available candidates and then submitting those candidates' résumés to the respective employers. Both employers' openings and the available candidates can and do change continuously and rapidly. This results in a high probability of missing business opportunities where a possible match is missed.
Therefore, a need exists for a system which enables vendors and candidates to present their résumés to all interested employers at the time that the employer has appropriate openings. The system should also allow employers to quickly and accurately search for qualified candidates on the basis of quantitative criteria on their skills and experience, without being overly inclusive or exclusive. The present invention fulfills these needs among others.